Beruflich Dokumente
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RRPXXX10.1177/0486613415586986Review of Radical Political EconomicsDolenec and Žitko
Abstract
Acknowledging that the concept of the commons is increasingly considered valuable for uniting
left struggles, we develop the theory of the commons by strengthening its link with a Marxist
critique of capitalism. In order to do so, we draw parallels between the work of Elinor Ostrom on
principles of sustainable governance and Branko Horvat’s theory of self-management developed
in the context of socialist Yugoslavia. We employ Foucault’s concept of governmentality to
address the need for a socialist political rationale and governing principles, drawing our starting
points from Ostrom and Horvat. First, we leave behind commons theorizing that relies on
“exodus” strategies, instead drawing inspiration from Yugoslav self-management as an attempt
of linking up the firm to wider social relations aimed at creating egalitarian, radically democratic,
and materially sustainable societies. Second, we propose that the search for alternatives to
capitalism and etatism goes beyond a change in ownership regime, and into principles of
governance. While much of the contemporary progressive political agenda is concerned with
distributional issues, we propose that devising governance principles to disable the formation
of class control is the crucial innovation needed to advance a socialist governmentality. Finally,
formulating the principles of socialist governmentality requires abandoning our reliance on
indefinite economic growth which is seriously threatening the material base of human life.
Keywords
commons theory, self-management, principles of socialist governmentality, Ostrom, Horvat
Corresponding Author:
Danijela Dolenec, Faculty of Political Science, University of Zagreb, Ozujska 11, Zagreb, HR-10110, Croatia.
Email: ddolenec@fpzg.hr
and escape the entrapments of a loaded vocabulary (Bollier and Helfrich 2012), which is impor-
tant if we care about enabling new kinds of political alliances. At the same time, the fact that the
theory of the commons is currently being diffused from the West into a region which had exten-
sively experimented with self-management practices during the 20th century is amusing, to say
the least.
Nevertheless, we take this as an opportunity to construct a theoretical interface between the
commons theory of Elinor Ostrom (1990, 1998, 1999, 2010) and Branko Horvat’s (1969, 1983)
theory of self-management in Yugoslavia. We propose that the Yugoslav experience is especially
valuable in this endeavour because it undermines the false, but widely held, binary opposition
between socialism as a regime based on state-ownership and capitalism as a regime based on
private property. As we show, Hardt and Negri’s (2009) claim that capitalism and socialism are
both regimes of property that exclude the common leads to a fallacious reading of the history of
socialism in Yugoslavia.
In this experimental reading, we explore whether the theory of the commons can be appropri-
ated by the contemporary left not just in order to claim a new political space that is neither state
nor market, but also to make headway toward a socialist governmentality. For Foucault (2008),
governmentality refers to techniques and procedures through which individuals and populations
are governed. It encompasses both the ideational and the practical component, defining in other
words both a discursive field which rationalizes power and specific forms of intervention such as
institutions and legal forms that govern subjects and objects of a political rationality (Lemke
2001). In deciding to employ Foucault’s concept of governmentality, we are aware of criticisms
according to which Foucault fell victim to the “discreet charm of economic liberalism” (Behrent
2009). This is particularly relevant to our endeavor since Foucault seemed to accept the Hayekian
notion of the market as a superior information processor (Mirowski 2013), while our attempt in
this essay depends on the plausibility of the thesis that intentional, as opposed to spontaneous,
collective action (cf. Williamson 1991) can yield efficient and equitable outcomes.
Rejecting the Hayekian notion according to which any attempt at creating collective gover-
nance mechanisms negates individual freedom, the key cue we take from Foucault is that social-
ism possesses a political rationale, but lacks the practical capacity to generate institutions that
would embody it. According to the notion of governmentality, which Foucault developed in his
lectures on bio-politics at Collège de France 1978–79, “what [socialism] really needs is to define
for itself its way of doing things and its way of governing” (2008: 94). If the economy is a “social
field of regulated practices,” the current capitalist system is, like any other economic order, a
historically open entity that can be changed politically (Lemke 2001: 193-194). Starting from
that premise, we propose that formulating the principles of socialist governmentality which can
generate socialist institutions is the single most important task for the contemporary left.
In order to do this, we draw on Ostrom’s theory of the commons and Horvat’s theory of self-
management, interfacing progressive strands of commons theory that affirm values of radical
democracy, material sustainability, and egalitarianism with a critical examination of capitalism
as a site of exploitation and domination. Given that large strands of contemporary commons
theory are agnostic about the capitalist social order, in theorizing principles of socialist govern-
mentality we aim to secure the link between the theory of the commons and the Marxian insis-
tence that capitalism should be analyzed as both a mode of production and a “mode of constructing
and organizing social life” (Brown 1995: 13).
This is our principal reason for relating the theory of commons to the work of Branko Horvat,
a Yugoslav economist who was a world-renown theoretician of self-management. Developing
the work of Benjamin Ward (1958) and other analysts of the labor-managed firm, he acquired
world-wide recognition for his empirical and theoretical work on self-management in Yugoslavia.
He has been described as a “Marxist well trained in neoclassical economics,” and a political
economist true to the term, incorporating in his work the “importance of institutions for an
economically efficient, politically democratic and just socialist society” (Franičević and Uvalić
2000: xxiii; also Ward 2000).
The Yugoslav experiment with self-management after the break with the Soviet Union in 1948
is relevant for discussions on the future of socialism given that it was the only existing economy
with this experience (Flaherty 1992). In the early 1950s Yugoslavia embarked on a project “of a
third way, between the anti-democratic consequences of the command economy and the limited
transformation of society wrought by the capitalist economy of social democracy” (Wachtel 2000:
6). In this context, Horvat’s key theoretical objectives were, first, to create “a political reason for
worker participation as the organizing scheme of society,” and second, to design institutions that
would achieve a “more just distribution of the proceeds of capital accumulation” (Wachtel 2000:
6), which together correspond to Foucault’s concept of a socialist governmentality.
Articulating the relations between a structural critique of capitalism on the one hand, and
progressive politics built around issues of inequality, democracy, and environmental sustainabil-
ity on the other, has proven difficult. During the cultural turn epitomized in the formation of
Western Marxism and post-Marxism in the 1960s, inherent contradictions of capitalism ceased to
be the focal point of discourses on the left, which was seduced by the idea that the antagonism
between capital and labor can be offset by implementing redistributive policies or by relying on
the discourse of rights (Brown 1995). Though feminist, antiracist, anti-imperial, and other “new
left” movements grew out of a critique of capitalism, over time they shifted into the domain of
cultural recognition and away from the critique of capitalism (Fraser 2009).1 From then on, much
of the social democratic project of the late 20th century was founded on the optimism according
to which social and political autonomy can be expanded without addressing the underlying logic
of capitalism (Brown 1995).
The reason we emphasize this lies in the fact that strands of contemporary commons theory
remain vulnerable to the same critique of proposing alternative production and consumption
schemes as reconcilable with the capitalist social order. Furthermore, this is why we link com-
mons theory with the theory of self-management. The behavior of any collective production unit
“derives to a large extent from the nature of the property and social relations in which the firm is
embedded” (Flaherty 2003: 2). While many commons movements rely on the autonomist logic
of creating spaces of freedom, Yugoslav experience teaches us that neither economic efficiency
nor social equity can be based on self-management at the level of the firm (ibid.). Therefore, we
leave aside those strands of commons movements that Mouffe (2013) criticizes as “exodus”
strategies, and introduce the analysis of self-management in Yugoslavia as an attempt of theoriz-
ing ways of linking up the firm to wider social relations aimed at creating egalitarian, radically
democratic, and materially sustainable societies.
Exploring this interface from the other angle, from commons theory we draw the lesson that
it is fallacious to equate socialism and capitalism with two different forms of property, as shown
in Table 1. This reduction has led to contemporary discussions (both within left theory and else-
where) operating within a set of the following binary opposites.
The first obvious departure from this simplified dichotomy between East and West is the fact
that in Yugoslavia it was social property and not state property that was the central institution of
the economic system of self-management. This fact opens up the possibility of relating Horvat’s
theory of self-management with currently revived theories of the commons which also rely on a
domain beyond the state and the market. Another reduction we want to draw attention to is that,
in the Cold War context, socialism became equated with distributive economic justice while
1We are aware that our critique of the “cultural turn” for relaxing the critique of capitalism extends also
to Foucault’s work. However, we are very specific in our borrowing from Foucault, restricting ourselves
to the concept of “socialist governmentality” and nowhere implying that we have borrowed along with it
Foucault’s methodology, ontology, or his overall conception of the political.
liberalism became synonymous with individual liberties, reducing the former to economic and
the latter to political practice (Brown 1995). As a result, today radical egalitarianism is “the
orphan of a defunct socialism,” purged of its “Utopian yearnings for a world of equal freedom
and dignity, and narrowed to the pursuit of a more equal distribution of goods” (Bowles and
Gintis 2000: 27). As if that was not enough, the subsequent collapse of real-socialist regimes in
the early 1990s “pulled the rug of relevancy out from under all disciplines that had depended on
their rhetorical thrust on proving or disproving Marxist paradigms” (Linebaugh 2008: 14). In
Yugoslavia the socialist experiment was further tainted by the violent breakup of the state and the
ensuing nation-building projects (Kasapović 1996). In the theoretically untenable, but politically
powerful, distinction between totalitarianism and democracy, in public discourse and academic
debates Marxian theory inevitably fell on the side of the former. Ironically, at a time when its
insights about the nature of the newly established social relations were needed the most – as the
peripheral capitalist formations in Eastern Europe began to take shape – Marxian theory was
nowhere in sight. Today, more than twenty years after the fated 1990s, “transition fatigue” and
the now-widespread dysphoria with mainstream party politics which is incapable of political
mobilization along social class lines (Dolenec 2012a) opened the way both for a reaffirmation of
Marxian analysis and for an emergence of progressive movements. This may be just the right
time for taking a fresh look at the Yugoslav legacy in attempting to formulate key principles of a
socialist governmentality for the 21st century.
Our point of entry into this potentially vast debate is a comparison of three elements found in
the works of two scholars who on first inspection have little in common: Elinor Ostrom (1990,
1999, 2010) and Branko Horvat (1969, 1983). While Ostrom was the cornerstone of the
Bloomington School at the University of Indiana, whose research program is usually associated
with new institutionalism that grew out of rational choice theory (Aligica and Boettke 2010),
Horvat was a world-renown Marxist economic theorist of self-management (Franičević and
Uvalić 2000). Therefore, in terms of theoretical background, the two thinkers are a world apart.2
However, a contemporary reading of their works reveals that they were theoretically preoc-
cupied with several issues that we argue help us think through the problem of devising a socialist
governmentality. We are not the first ones to make the link between theories of self-management
and Ostrom’s work on the commons (see Lebowitz 2003; Flaherty 20033), but to our knowledge,
the work of Ostrom and Horvat has not to date been directly compared in search of principles of
socialist governmentality. The first question we address refers to their respective understanding
of what the often used term of moving “beyond states and markets” would actually entail. The
second discusses ownership and its relation to governance, as well as how self-management at
2One thing that they did have in common was a Nobel Prize nomination in economics. Branko Horvat’s
book Political Economy of Socialism (1983) was the basis for his nomination, though he did not win it.
Elinor Ostrom on the other hand won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2009 for Governing the Commons,
being the first woman political scientist to be given this award.
3Papers given at “The Work of Karl Marx and the Challenges of the 21st Century” conference in Havana,
the level of the firm is related to the problem of scale. Finally, we conclude with a comparative
insight into how both thinkers treated the underlying fundamentals of economic growth and
material sustainability. However, before taking a closer look at how Ostrom and Horvat enable
us to re-think socialist governmentality, in the next section we underscore the key challenge in
relation to which their theoretical efforts represent a step forward.
Without going into problems of theoretical compatibility between Hayek and the Austrian
school of economics on the one hand, and rational choice liberalism on the other,4 here it is suf-
ficient to recognize the importance of the knowledge problem and the prisoner’s dilemma for
negating the possibility of rational institutional design and subverting rational collective action.
Once the left was reduced to an interest group primarily concerned with distributional issues and
deprived of theoretical foundations for articulating social change, institutional arrangements
based on private property and capitalist markets had no serious alternative. As part of the overall
ideological shift to what we today term neoliberalism, these theoretical assumptions made a deep
imprint on the way social interaction is understood in contemporary societies, where no possibil-
ity exists for overstepping the narrow corridors of instrumental rationality and “everyone is
reduced to the status of an entrepreneur of the self” (Mirowski 2005: 93). Acknowledging that
rational choice liberalism was very successful in challenging the self-perception of the left in
terms of its theoretical and empirical coherence (Amadae 2003), it is against this background that
we explore Ostrom’s and Horvat’s work in search of principles of socialist governmentality.
self-organization and collective ownership couched in the language of the commons have been
an important force in contemporary social movements across the world that are struggling against
the privatization of utilities, infrastructure, and services in the public sector.
At the same time, Ostrom’s critique of the states and markets dichotomy is incomplete. Ostrom
was concerned with theorizing principles of sustainable governance, and not with challenging the
underlying logic of capitalism. As a result, the potential for social change within her conception
of the commons is limited. Borrowing Fraser’s (2003) typology of affirmative and transformative
struggles, we may say that Ostrom’s conception of the commons inspires mostly affirmative
action, which remedies some unwanted consequences of capitalist modes of production, but
leaves the underlying structure intact. For instance, many commons initiatives focus on urban
gardens, communal childcare, or developing workplace democracy. While they are worthwhile
as sites of individual emancipation and as valuable experience of grassroots organizing, on their
own they often represent a-political, fragmented actions that cannot address the underlying logic
of the problems at hand (Dolenec 2012b). In other words, they reveal the same weaknesses as
those we identify with respect to “new left” movements since the 1960s: a dislocation from a
structural critique of capitalism.
In addition, these “complementary commons” initiatives often represent middle-class life
projects, since only people with sufficient income and spare time can engage in them. In other
words, we may introduce hundreds of worker-owned factories, but if they operate within a capi-
talist logic of production then we have not brought about a transformative social change towards
radical egalitarian democracy. As research has repeatedly shown, “capitalist markets pressure
democratically-managed firms to conform to capitalist behavior” (Gunn 2000: 455), and the way
for this to change is to link the firm to wider social institutions based on principles of democracy,
equality, and sustainability. In this we follow Mouffe’s (2013) critique of contemporary left the-
ory epitomized in Hardt and Negri’s work on multitudes, which conceptualizes radical politics in
terms of desertion. Following traditional Marxist conceptions, they see the state as a monolithic
apparatus of domination that cannot be transformed, but should be evacuated of power in order
to wither away and make room for a reconciled society.
In contrast to that, we contend that the theory of the commons should be advanced, as Mattei
(2012) and De Angelis (2012) have argued, by rejecting the conception of the commons as a
Third Way. Ostrom’s work should be built on in the direction that affirms the values of radical
democracy, material sustainability, and egalitarianism without forgetting to critically examine
capitalism as a site of exploitation and domination. In this way we may harness the commons’
“revolutionary potential and legitimate claims for a radical egalitarian redistribution of resources”
(Mattei 2012: 42).
In contrast to Ostrom’s concept of the commons as a third domain, Horvat represents an
attempt at theorizing a radically transformed society which follows after capitalism is disman-
tled. Having seen the contradiction of the implementation of worker’s self-management first
hand in Yugoslavia, Horvat was aware that the search for an alternative to capitalism and etatism
required more than a simple change of ownership regime. The starting point of his analysis was
a critical survey of two economic systems: capitalism and etatism. For Horvat, etatism was syn-
onymous with the Soviet model, i.e. a monolithic structure based on state ownership of the means
of production in which the state controls public ownership by means of appointing the manage-
ment (1983: 183).
In Horvat’s analysis, capitalism and etatism share hierarchy as a fundamental organizational
principle, both on the societal level and on the level of productive units. As a result, within them
the formation of a class society is inevitable (Horvat 1983). In real-existing socialism, commod-
ity fetishism (as a distinctive feature of capitalism) was simply replaced with “bureaucratic rank
fetishism,” while the infallibility of the market was replaced with the infallibility of the bureau-
crat, both having a logic of their own, an autonomy of sorts, and a superiority to all social
subjects (Horvat 1969: 26). While our critique of Ostrom showed that the commons should not
be advanced as complementary to existing capitalist relations, Horvat’s analysis reminds us that
the political project based on the commons should not forget that the state is also a vehicle of
domination.
In other words, for Horvat capitalism and etatism are both inefficient and politically unaccept-
able; hence he develops the theory of the self-managed socialist enterprise, which would operate
within a “federation of self-governing communes” (Horvat 1969: 44), as Marx had outlined in
the history of the 1871 Paris Commune. The self-managed socialist enterprise is the central insti-
tution based in principles of participatory democracy and social ownership. For Horvat, social
ownership, as an alternative to capitalism and etatism, implies that “[t]here exists no particular
class of owners of the means of production, either individual or collective” (ibid.: 236). This
entails two fundamental rights and an obligation: the right to use, change, and sell commodities
and to reap the benefits from the use of productive assets; and the obligation not to diminish the
value of productive assets (ibid.: 237). The rights and obligation deriving from social ownership
act as a vehicle for the establishment of social relations that will not be exploitative, and will not
allow concentration of power by capital or the state. Social ownership is, in Horvat’s view, a
foundation on which the right of every member of society to work and compete for any position
in line with her skills and capabilities, and the right of every member to participate in manage-
ment on equal terms, can be realized (ibid.: 237). In other words, the theory of self-management
envisioned a “society-wide system of production and distribution, including but not reduced to
structure of the firm” (Flaherty 2003: 3).
which such communities form nested tiers and overlapping entities in a polycentric system of
governance, echoing Horvat’s idea of an association of associations. However, in contrast to
Horvat’s attempt at constructing a detailed theoretical model of a future socialist society, Ostrom’s
theory attempted to identify the main foundational principles of successful collective action.
Beyond that, she relied on an understanding of human societies as complex adaptive systems,
composed of a large number of elements which “produce emergent properties that are not easy to
predict by analyzing the separate parts of a system” (Ostrom 1999: 521).
Horvat (1969) also claimed that normative solutions to the question of ownership are insuffi-
cient. Class societies did not emerge from individual private ownership over means of production
but from class control over the means of production (ibid.). Abolishing private ownership does
not do away with a class society because it still leaves open the question of exploitation of labor,
which can come from other types of hierarchy. In the Soviet model the source of class control and
hierarchy was the state, and self-management was an attempt to abolish bureaucratic class con-
trol over means of production. In an attempt to advance a socialist governmentality the crucial
innovation consisted in devising democratic governance principles which would disable the for-
mation of class control and hierarchy. In contrast to that, much of the progressive political agenda
in recent years has been concerned not with democratizing power but with distributing goods
(Brown 1995). The focus on distribution helps maintain the liberal assumption of a limited gov-
ernment, weakening the socialist objective of ever extending the domains of self-government
(Hindess 1996).
In advocating a focus on governance, and not ownership regimes, we are therefore trying to
shift attention back from distributional issues to questions of democratizing power. Some critical
conceptions of the commons are in line with this focus on governmentality rather than property
regimes (e.g. Mattei 2012). For De Angelis (2012), the commons are a vehicle for claiming own-
ership over conditions needed for life – social and biological – and its reproduction. Along the
same lines, Helfrich and Bollier (2012) conceptualize the commons as a demand for effective
social control over resources. In other words, it is in direct confrontation with the state that public
goods are transformed into commons (Harvey 2012). For instance, public space is usually a
space under political control of the state and not accessible to all; it becomes a common space
through political contestation such as in occupations of Syntagma, Gezi, or Tahrir.
In considering problems of hierarchy, Horvat encounters the problem of expert discourse sta-
tus, which he saw as a rather permanent impediment to the principle of inclusive democratic
participation. In order to overcome this, Horvat (1983) distinguishes between two forms of hier-
archy. Controlling hierarchy is the end product of class struggle in capitalism or etatism (and
hence can be removed), while coordinating hierarchy is the product of the division of labor and
cannot be removed. This distinction corresponds to a division of a self-governing economic unit
into two different domains, one in which each member of the productive community can partici-
pate as it is concerned with value judgments, and the other in which decisions are made based on
expert knowledge. However, talk of hierarchy is usually anathema to the left (Harvey 2011), and
here we find Horvat struggling with the same problem. Both he and Ostrom devoted attention to
devising principles of self-government of small communities, inescapably raising the question of
scaling up direct democratic principles to address global problems. Ostrom advanced the concept
of polycentricism, particularly in the context of climate change. Polycentric systems are charac-
terized by multiple governing authorities at differing scales, rather than a monocentric unit where
each unit exercises considerable independence to make norms and rules within a specific domain,
uses local knowledge, and adapts over time. Though their terminology is substantially different,
Ostrom’s ideas about overcoming problems of scale are not dissimilar to Horvat’s idea of an
association of associations, while both echo Marx’s “federation of self-governing communes.”
Going back to ownership regimes, Harvey (2011) reminds us that at its current dynamic, indi-
vidualized capital accumulation perpetually threatens to destroy the two basic common property
resources that undergird all forms of production: the laborer and the land.6 Having in mind the
special status of land and labor in the shaping of a socialist governmentality, it might be worth-
while exploring the proposition according to which neither land nor labor could fall subject to
any property regime. Instead, like in the theory of self-management, rights to resources would
derive from work and participation, not ownership. Here the Yugoslav theory of self-manage-
ment links up with the contemporary commons movements which emphasize use-value as
opposed to exchange value, sharing, and producing in common.7 To ensure this, all those who
participate in a common have an equal voice in making decisions on the provisions and rules
governing its management. Apart from fulfilling the imperative of individual emancipation, pur-
suing such a strategy has important implications for the viability of a materially sustainable
development of human societies, to which we turn next.
6Which are, together with money, fictitious commodities, i.e. not produced to be sold on a market (Polany
([1944]2001). Treating land, labor, and money as if they were commodities has far reaching consequences.
7See e.g. D. Bollier and S. Helfrich, The Wealth of the Commons.
8OECD Better Life Initiative http://www.oecd.org/statistics/betterlifeinitiativemeasuringwell-beingand-
progress.htm
5. Conclusion
Our first objective in this essay was to create an interface between contemporary commons the-
ory and the theory of self-management as it grew out of the Yugoslav experience. Arguing that
the two ostensibly distant strands of economic theorizing share important preoccupations, we
wanted to parse out the productive strands of commons theory from the ones we consider less
pertinent for the socialist project, emphasizing the necessity of revitalizing Marxist theory in
understanding contemporary challenges that European political economies are facing. Though
social movements are only beginning to frame their activities as struggles for the commons, we
argue that this is a politically viable strategy that needs to be advanced further. The second part
of the essay offered an experimental juxtaposition of Ostrom’s theory of the commons and
Horvat’s theory of self-management in Yugoslavia as a way of advancing the theory of the com-
mons. Our aim was to explore how they can help us make headway in advancing a socialist
governmentality capable of addressing crucial concerns of 21st century societies. Clearly, in this
essay we have (only just) opened several interrelated questions important for this endeavor.
First, in discussing the commons as a space beyond both markets and states, we criticized
those strands of the commons movement which treat the commons as complementary to the
existing political and economic system, developing them as a kind of “Third Way.” This we see
as the already tried dead-end of left politics from the late 1960s, which was dislocated from a
structural critique of the underlying logic of capitalism. Second, Horvat’s discussion of the
Yugoslav experience reminded us that progressive politics must not stop at defending existing
public institutions and services from advancing commodification, but that it must incorporate a
critique of the state as a vehicle of domination. Next, we suggested that the current focus on the
political claim for common ownership rights as a crucial institutional innovation important for
the socialist project is overemphasized. Both Ostrom and Horvat primarily devoted their atten-
tion to problems of governmentality. The specific Yugoslav experience has taught us that the
normative abolishing of private property in an economy does not resolve the problem of class
control. Hence, in addition to inventing a new form of ownership, the crucial contribution of the
theory of self-management was in devising democratic governance principles which would dis-
able the formation of class control and hierarchy.
Both Ostrom and Horvat were engaged in theorizing governance, but while Horvat attempted
to construct a detailed model of a future society, today it seems we can make better headway by
adopting Ostrom’s approach based on identifying the main foundational principles of a socialist
governmentality. Also, both Horvat and Ostrom devoted attention to the problem of scaling-up
decision making in order to address problems which require wider regional or global coordina-
tion. Here we juxtaposed Ostrom’s idea of polycentrism to Horvat’s concept of an association of
associations. While for Ostrom the primary concern in devising complex governance systems
was to ensure sustainability, Horvat’s objective was to disable the creation of hierarchies that
would lead to another form of class control. Both of their objectives are in our minds political
imperatives of today. Finally, we have suggested that contemporary left thinking must revise its
unquestioned reliance on economic growth, where Ostrom’s principles of sustainable gover-
nance offer a good starting point. If the contemporary left is concerned with advancing a society
where “humans might govern themselves by governing together” (Brown 1995: 5), its theoretical
relevance today depends on a head-on confrontation with all the dilemmas we identified in the
conversation between Ostrom and Horvat.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
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Author Biographies
Danijela Dolenec is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Political Science at the University of Zagreb,
where she teaches comparative politics and social science methodology; she is a co-founder of Group 22, a
green-left think tank. Her research focuses on post-communist democratization and the political economy
of European countries.
Mislav Žitko is a research assistant at the Faculty of Social Science and Humanities, University of Zagreb.
He is also a co-founder of the Center for Labor Studies in Zagreb. His research interests include philosophy
of social sciences, heterodox political economy, and history of economic thought.